in my ongoing quest to hack every wheel of fortune game, here's Wheel of Fortune (1987, Sharedata, DOS).
See the wheel animation in the corner? Wanna guess how they generate that animation?
this game is so small that 54% of the disk it came on was used for THIS ONE ANIMATION
Well I guess it's about as wasteful as say a GIF, although maybe would have compressed better and some pixels would be from the previous frame.
weirdly WHEELS.DAT is a format where every frame is the same size, and it uses a format that says up top how big each frame is
and then GIRL.DAT (because they didn't get the rights to Vanna White?) is a format where the frames are different sizes, but it DOESN'T put size headers on them, they're just raw
it simply being an animation means I can replace it pretty easily, of course.
okay so the game encodes the puzzles by XORing each line with a different key.
Those four keys are:
0x4A, 0x61, 0x6B, and 0x65
which entirely coincidentally spells out "Jake" in ASCII
extracted them:
535 PHRASE [' ', ' NO LAUGHING ', ' MATTER ', ' ']
536 TITLE [' ', ' BEN HUR ', ' ', ' ']
537 THING [' ', ' TUXEDO ', ' ', ' ']
538 PERSON [' ', ' AARON BURR ', ' ', ' ']
539 EVENT [' ', ' BABY SHOWER ', ' ', ' ']
this version of wheel of fortune has 1008 puzzles across 9 categories.
The game defines 10 categories, but "GROUP" is never used
193 PERSON
189 PHRASE
168 PLACE
158 THING
106 TITLE
104 EVENT
42 PEOPLE
27 THINGS
21 LANDMARK
Oh hey! I've got this game! Installed on my Tandy 1000!
I checked other ShareData software, but none of it features any Jakes, with the possible exception of The All New Family Feud (1989) which has two programmers credited, and one is "J. A. Huston"
Possibly our Jake?
the software is listed as having been written by "Timely Publications, Inc" of Largo, FL, 33540
@foone According to state records, they were active from ’87 to ’93.
Tampa used to be a banking center, and had a lot of tech around that time. This looks like an odd side job for at least one of the five people I see in the business registration listing, who otherwise were in the IT side of banking (it seems).
@foone That's the original name of the company that would become Marvel Comics, maybe someone having a lil joke
@foone Yep. Sounds like an interesting guy, who made the games programming something like a family business. They must have been living in the Tampa area around that time.
the names the game can use for computer players:
SARAH
ERIN
JIM
CARLOS
ROD
ALAN
RYAN
MICHELLE
COLLEEN
MIKE
NANCY
PAT
JOANNE
VANESSA
Going bankrupt, must be because you were rickrolled.
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so @artandtechnic found someone who had a Timely Productions Inc in Florida:
seems Roderick J Keenan died in 2017
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/236033610/roderick_j-keenan
probably the same "Rod" that shows up in the computer players. I wonder if his middle name was Jake?
Nope, his middle name was James:
https://www.vvmf.org/Honor-Roll/3887/RoderickJamesKeenan/
here's the episode of Wheel of Fortune he was on, episode 586, Season 4, September 1986:
the second edition is clearly based on the same code, but was developed by "I.J.E., Inc"
I wonder if they just hired a different company to update the data files with more puzzles?
@foone the best thing about digging around with old retro pc detritus is the occasional brilliant flash of humanity that speaks to you out of nowhere
all these old games and computers and weird peripherals were made by real people with lives and stories to tell.
i wish i could tell more of them!
@foone The character looks more like the original hostess, Susan Stafford, than Vanna White:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0821345/bio/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
Stafford was the first woman to get an emmy nomination for a game show, then quit hosting and acting and ended up getting a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.
@moira the game's' from 1987, though, vanna had been gone for 5 years at that point
@gewt strange name for a cemetery, really. seems like the opposite of what they do
@lanodan @StryderNotavi @foone the patent ran out https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/11/msg00160.html iirc gif needed the patent to work. “Burn all the gifs” and the push for png was big once it was discovered. I seem to remember the code was published in Dr Dobb’s Journal and so the GIF authors thought they could use it.
